The Republican Who Saved Civil Rights

Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The placid town of Piqua, Ohio, sits in the state’s west-central section, barely half-an-hour’s ride from the Dayton bicycle shop where Orville and Wilbur Wright helped prove that man could fly. Its name comes from the Shawnee Indian phrase “Othath-He-Waugh-Pe-Qua,” meaning “He has risen from the ashes!” and its best-known homegrown product is probably the Mills Brothers, the close harmony African-American singing ensemble that thrived from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War. The modern municipality incorporates a community once known as Rossville, which became the first free-black enclave in the region after a local slave owner’s death in 1833.

Today, Piqua is represented in Congress by the Honorable John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, who has shown himself politically unwilling (or at least unable) to protect gay men and lesbians from employment discrimination, to address the need for comprehensive immigration reform or simply to keep the government up and running in the face of the tea party’s caprice last fall.

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Fifty years ago, the congressman from Piqua was an equally conservative fellow — but an altogether different man. His name was Bill McCulloch, and at the height of John F. Kennedy’s effort to pass the first comprehensive federal civil rights law since Reconstruction, it was McCulloch — a now forgotten figure — who rose above mere partisanship to give first Kennedy, and then Lyndon B. Johnson, the power to pass the single most important law of the 20th century.

McCulloch’s name is hardly a household one — even in Ohio. But one witness to the role he played in forcing the country to live up to its founding creed bore passionate, private testimony to his importance. “Please forgive the emotional tone of this letter,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wrote from aboard the yacht Christina, when she got word in 1971 of McCulloch’s planned retirement from Congress. “But I want you to know how much your example means to me.”

“I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s,” she continued. “You made a personal commitment to President Kennedy in October 1963, against all the interests of your district. When he was gone, your personal integrity and character were such that you held to that commitment despite enormous pressure and political temptations not to do so. There were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill, without appearing to do so, but you never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone else along with you.

“And as for my dear Jack, it is a precious thought to me that in the last month of his life, when he had so many problems that seemed insoluble, he had the shining gift of your nobility, to give him the hope and faith he needed to carry on.”

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William Moore McCulloch was a rock-ribbed conservative Republican from small town Ohio — and also a passionate backer of civil rights. He was the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee and his conditions for supporting the bill drove the legislative strategy of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and required trying something that had never succeeded before: breaking a civil rights filibuster in the Senate.

In popular myth, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the work of Martin Luther King Jr.’s street demonstrations, John Kennedy’s murder and Lyndon B. Johnson’s indomitable will. The full story is more complex — and far more interesting. And Bill McCulloch was at its very heart. On July 2, 1963 — the same day that leading civil rights groups met in New York to plan the March on Washington, Burke Marshall, the Kennedy administration’s point man on civil rights, flew to Ohio for a crucial meeting with McCulloch, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. McCulloch was an important member of Congress, but in the custom of the day, he still kept his hometown law office in Piqua, on the second floor of the National Bank Building, where the sole decoration was a framed copy of an excerpt from Edmund Burke’s letter to the electors of Bristol, in which the great 18th-century statesman had declared: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Judgment was precisely what Bill McCulloch had been delivering to the voters of Ohio’s 4th Congressional District since 1947. In most ways, he was a conventionally conservative Republican, an avatar of fiscal probity. “There is no such thing as easy money from Washington,” he declared during his 1948 campaign. He was among the few members of Congress who never spent his entire office allowance, but instead returned the excess funds to the government.

The March on Washington. | Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress

But McCulloch was the descendant of pre-Civil War abolitionists, and he was an avid supporter of civil rights, even though his district had a black population of just 2.7 percent. In January 1963 — 4½ months before Kennedy addressed the nation promising a broad civil rights law — McCulloch had introduced his own civil rights measure in the House. But the Democrats who controlled the House had yet to schedule a single hearing on McCulloch’s measure — or on any of nearly 90 similar Republican-backed bills, including one from New York’s charismatic young Rep. John Lindsay. So McCulloch was more than ripe for Burke Marshall’s appeal. But he had two strict conditions.

First, McCulloch told Marshall that he expected the Kennedy administration to support a strong but practical bill, one that could pass the full House, and then to fight for that very same bill in the Senate, without accepting amendments that would weaken its impact or effectiveness. McCulloch had backed civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960, only to be dismayed when their toughest provisions were bargained away in the Senate. If Kennedy’s new bill suffered a similar fate, McCulloch warned, House Republicans would oppose it when it came back to the House for final approval — and no civil rights bill could pass either chamber without Republican support. Second, McCulloch wanted the White House to give full public credit to Republicans for the bill.

Kennedy accepted McCulloch’s terms, and an improbable alliance was born. But McCulloch’s demands had a fateful effect on all the subsequent legislative strategy. His insistence on no softening of the measure in the Senate – and his undoubted ability to deliver Republican votes — assured that the administration would have to attempt something that had never before succeeded in American history: to break a civil rights filibuster in the Senate, rather than avoid one by watering down the bill to cut off debate. McCulloch drove a hard bargain, but no man was ever more fair.

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William Moore McCulloch was born in 1901 and raised on the family homestead. He earned a law degree from The Ohio State University, and after graduation, he taught school for a year before moving to Jacksonville, Fla., where he began the practice of law — and first witnessed the day-to-day realities of Jim Crow segregation. He returned to establish a thriving law practice in Piqua and steadily rose in local politics, eventually becoming speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.